I was running around town with my sweetheart and I snapped these photos with my ancient, but mighty, iPhone. This is a neighborhood at the southern edge of Korea Town, south of Wilshire Blvd. When I was a little girl I used to have dreams about Los Angeles. It was city crossed by rushing canals and there were a million cities hidden within the city, and I was always trying to find my way from one to another. Turns out those early dreams were slightly prophetic. Here we have a pocket of Old Hollywood glamour in an area now pocked by bad signage, vinyl windows, and uncontrolled development…
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“There were a million cities within the city, and I was always trying to find my way from one to the other”. That is so beautiful and evocative, the work of a real writer with a great eye; that passage also reminds me of what certain movies can do, they provide gateways to other worlds (and I don’t just mean in the science fiction sense). Be it Ophuls or Hitchcock, Altman or Powell, Minelli or Wilder, great directors (and writers and costume designers and cinematographers and…) show us the world as we’ve never seen it before. Just as some of the people on the screen represent – in some way – who we might like to be or whom we may dream of meeting. In dreams, indeed. Perhaps cinema is the place where dreams and reality are one.
Love the photographs, what amazing buildings but it’s grest that you *see* them so to speak.
I wonder what you think is the truest depiction of Hollywood or LA? The Bad and the Beautiful? Short Cuts? Mulholland Drive?!
How about “LA Story”? It has such a sweet sensibility, and it’s whimsical and witty, and, for me, captures Los Angeles like Woody Allen captured NYC in “Manhattan”.
Fitting. And sweet. I’ve no doubt you know this but there’s another link between LA Story and Manhattan (a film I adore whatever dubious things that may be read into it, but then Woody was/is at his best a master); in an earlier version of Manhattan Ike was to have been encouraged to try to get Tracy back by…a road sign, and what gives Harris romantic advice in LA Story? You’ve got it! I love the Do-Wah-Diddy scene in Martin’s picture, it makes you feel happy. Funny you should mention Steve Martin again, he’s just become a father for the first time, hasn’t he? He better be careful taking after the baby, he may become a tired and hazy guy… All Bad Puns Copyright Me (unfortunately!)
A father at 67, and the baby was born in December and announced on Wednesday. I think they would have preferred it if nobody had noticed until the child was 21 😉
Undoubtedly! 88 year-old Steve Martin and his fiftysomething wife would like to announce the birth of a bouncing baby – 21 years ago! (a wicked bad taste second punchline to that joke might be “Well, Steve would like to but at present he can’t even use a light-switch”. Ach. I told you it was in poor taste!)